TypePad versus WordPress: Nested categories

On this blog it may not make much sense, at least not yet, but WordPress has one category functionality that TypePad does not have: nested categories, or parent categories and children categories if you so wish. Dividing your categories into more categories is a very useful feature if you are blogging about topics within a topic. It can give your blog a much better structure than just listing the categories.

On this blog I could for instance make something like this:

TypePad
— Pros
— Cons

WordPress
— Pros
— Cons

where Pros and Cons are children categories of their parent categories, TypePad and WordPress. This is very nice if you want to structure your topics neatly instead of just listing them one by one. Mind you, by default, categories are ordered alphabetically. If you desire a different order, you need to put the categories into a text widget by hand.

This option presents you with a list of your categories (and structure). You can edit the structure of your existing categories by clicking them.

The default option is “None”. Select the drop-down menu and you will be presented with the list and structure of your categories so far. Assign a parent (or “none”) as you see fit. For this blog I changed “Good things about TypePad”, as it was before to “TypePad – Pros”, as it is now.

You can have as many parents and children and childrens’ children as you wish.

Under the post, in the Categories section, click “All categories” and select the correct category.

Or click “Add New Category” and select from a similar list like before.

Make your nested categories appear on your blog

Done after doing the above? No. To make the nested categories now appear on your blog you need to go to your categories widget and check the box that says “Show hierarchy”.

Limitations

As I said above one of the limitations is that it can only be done alphabetically if you use the category widget; if you use a text widget, you can put the categories in any order. And obviously, in this case, they do not have to be nested, although I don’t recommend putting non-nested categories in a nested structure in a text box; potentially very confusing, URL-wise that is, since nested categories appear like this: